Web-based telephony applications have recently been developed whereby a user is able to use web-based tools and software in order to establish a telephone call, from for example, his or her PC phone, to another user at another telephone terminal (e.g. standard desktop or PC phone or any other suitable type of telephone). The means by which the user initiates the telephone call is predominantly through world-wide-web addresses that contain information that can be used to identify the person to which the call is placed, e.g. a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) with embedded Directory Number (DN) information. In the context of this document, a system which processes such a URL to identify a called-party and establish a telephony call to that called-party is referred to as a Web-based Telephony Application (WTA).
Known telephony systems are independent of and separate from applications on the user's PC, such as the user's calendar or diary. This means that the end user needs to manage inter-relationships between the telephony system and his or her other personal software tools. This is often complex and time consuming. To illustrate the example further, consider the case where a user has several scheduled calls and/or telephone conferences to participate in during the day. To efficiently manage these calls, it is necessary for the user to manually enter telephone numbers, conference passcodes, and scheduled times into the aforementioned personal software tools. The format of this information and in particular the telephone numbers and timing information is in general unfamiliar to an unskilled user.
Another problem is that existing telephony systems cannot easily take into account the needs of users who have several different contact numbers that they use throughout a particular day. For example, a person may have a cellular telephone, a work telephone and a home telephone. A web-based telephony application ideally needs to be able to take this into account so that a caller has a single address/number that can be used to receive a call at irrespective of the time of day
Other problems arise associated with conference calls. Typically, conference calls have been arranged by making a reservation on a conference bridge for which a conference bridge telephone number and a password are issued. The conferencees (also referred to as participants) are required to dial the unfamiliar conference bridge number and enter the password. This is complex and time consuming for the users, especially those having many conference calls throughout the day.
Another example of time information being relevant to placing a call is a web-based telephony application, used by enterprises to enable end users to select links on a web site to access a call centre. In this type of situation, the web site typically provides access to the central call centre telephone number rather than to particular call centre agents. An automated answering device representing the call centre telephone number then routes the call to the correct call centre agent depending on various factors. One common factor used to route the call in such applications is the time-of-day. In a simple example, outside of office hours the caller is directed to voice-mail. If this routing could occur external to the call-center's telephony system, significant computer processing could be off-loaded from the call-centre's telephony system to an external system.
An object of the present invention is to provide a method and apparatus for establishing a telephone call over a communications network at a specified time using a web-based telephony application which overcomes or at least mitigates one or more of the problems noted above.
Further benefits and advantages of the invention will become apparent from a consideration of the following detailed description given with reference to the accompanying drawings, which specify and show preferred embodiments of the invention.